23 Facts About The Cantos

The Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a canto.

Section he wrote at the end of World War II, a composition started while he was interned by American occupying forces in Italy, has become known as The Pisan The Cantos, and is the part of the work most often considered to be self-sufficient.

The Cantos can appear on first reading to be chaotic or structureless because it lacks plot or a definite ending.

The Cantos takes a position between the mythic unity of Eliot's poem and Joyce's flow of consciousness and attempting to work out how history and personality can cohere in the "field" of poetry.

Critics like Hugh Kenner who take a more positive view of The Cantos have tended to follow this hint, seeing the poem as a poetic record of Pound's life and reading that sends out new branches as new needs arise with the final poem, like a tree, displaying a kind of unpredictable inevitability.

Related searches

The Cantos was initially published in the form of separate sections, each containing several cantos that were numbered sequentially using Roman numerals .

The Cantos VIII–XI draw on the story of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, 15th-century poet, condottiero, lord of Rimini and patron of the arts.

The Cantos saw it as an example of the post-Montsegur survival of the Provencal tradition of "clear song", precision of thought and language, and nonconformity of belief.

The Cantos disliked what he saw as the superstitious pseudo-mysticism promulgated by both Buddhists and Taoists, to the detriment of rational politics.

The Cantos established just prices for foodstuffs, bringing us back to the ideas of Social Credit.

The Cantos used these broadcasts to express his full range of opinions on culture, politics and economics, including his opposition to American involvement in a European war and his anti-Semitism.

The Cantos later found a copy of the Pocket Book of Verse, edited by Morris Edmund Speare, in the latrine.

However, The Pisan The Cantos is generally the most admired and read section of the work.

Canto LXXIV immediately introduces the reader to the method used in the Pisan The Cantos, which is one of interweaving themes somewhat in the manner of a fugue.

The Cantos, in turn, becomes the Chinese Ouan Jin, or man with an education.

The Cantos, in turn, brings us back to the Albigensian Crusade and the troubadour world of Bernard de Ventadorn.

The Cantos asks her if the American troops behave well and she replies OK.

The Cantos then asks how they compare to the Germans and she replies that they are the same.

The crystal image, which is to remain important until the end of The Cantos, is a composite of frozen light, the emphasis on inorganic form found in the writings of the mystic Heydon, the air in Dante's Paradiso, and the mirror of crystal in the Chou King amongst other sources.

The thrones in The Cantos are an attempt to move out from egoism and to establish some definition of an order possible or at any rate conceivable on earth … Thrones concerns the states of mind of people responsible for something more than their personal conduct.

The Cantos's represents a life spent meditating on beauty which resulted in vanity and ended in loss and solitude.

The Cantos has always been controversial; initially so because of the experimental nature of the writing.

Poetic response to The Cantos is summed up in Bunting's poem, "On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos":.